It is 4:00 am as I write this and we are waiting for the first cores to come up from the Bowers Ridge sites. Soon we will hear the three little words “Core on deck”, and that will continue for the next 8 days.

We will have to process more than a hundred samples at this site, and everybody is now finishing up their site reports from the Umnak Plateau to get it out of the way before the new samples arrive. At the Umnak site we cleared out 69 samples so we know our way around the lab now. I guess we all pretty much have found the most efficient way to work, so it will hopefully be smoother to analyze the first Bowers Ridge samples then the first Umnak Plateau samples. We’ll just have to wait and see what comes up…